Friday, October 30, 2009

Okay - I think the consensus is that we are still good people & had a right to be mad. Lisa, you're right about the heaping coals of kindness, but I'm still gonna have to pray about that one! Because the charity had done so much work loading stuff already, we let them take a lot. That's also why it makes me mad that she called Nathan greedy. It makes me want to demand everything back if she's going to call us greedy anyway!

But moving on, we've managed to get a lot of work done this week, with some help and some loong hours put in by Nathan. The entire LR and our bedroom have been painted and Kaleigh's room just needs another coat. We're still working on getting wallpaper down out of the twins' room.

Here's a couple more pictures. Kaleigh's room is the yellow. I think it's adorable, but doesn't match her bedding at all so we had to paint. The last one is the view of the kitchen from the front door. This is truly an OPEN floor plan. I think it will be a lot of fun.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

House Drama

Please read if you have the time!I've got to write this post to vent, and I also want honest input.

We were able to close on our house Monday after a long wait (yay!) The situation was a short sale and a divorce situation. Everyone had already moved out but there was a lot of stuff still left in the house. After we got the house on Monday, we went over Monday night to start working. The first thing that had to be done was clearing the upstairs so John Paul kindly came over and helped Nathan cart stuff from the garage and almost every bedroom to the basement. They spend about 5 hours doing that and we cleaned up. We really didn't look through the stuff closely, but a lot of it was in good condition, there was some furniture that we could use, baby things, etc. Tons of clothes and other stuff that we just barely looked at and threw in trash bags and figured we could go through later and keep some, have a garage sale, and/or donate to a charity. In the meantime, it was all stacked neatly in the basement. I should mention that Claire (our real estate agent) had warned us to change the locks b/c of the situation. We were planning on doing this, but weren't able to on Monday.

So Tuesday we pull up to the house around 3:00 and see a Uhaul parked in front of it full of stuff. After looking closer, we discover that it is the stuff from the basement. We find out that the previous homeowner told this local charity that they could have the stuff and she came over and let them in the house. Now I was absolutely appalled. I am still mad when I think about it. Nathan was about ten times worse. They had almost loaded everything, including a lot of the furniture that we were going to use, and we told them we were sorry but that it was our stuff and it needed to go back in the house. We ended up letting them keep about 10 trash bags full of stuff. We donate to charities regularly but I like to get a tax deduction for it when we do. Also at this point we had no evidence that they were even from a charity. We also found out later that about $50 worth of our stuff had been taken as well. The whole time I am thinking to myself "what is the Christian thing to do here?" But still feeling very violated. We immediately pulled off all the doorknobs and took them to get the locks changed. In the meantime while I was gone, the previous homeowner showed up. Nathan talked to her and she claimed that she thought she had until Wednesday to get the stuff out, which I think was a lie. First of all - how do you not know when your house has gone from your possession? Secondly, everything had obviously been moved and cleaned. It was in nowhere near the condition it was left in.

Now we go to today. I had calmed down but I'm mad all over again. Nathan went to the charity which I won't mention at this point but may later and asked to get some things back that they had taken which actually belonged to his dad. They said that they didn't have them, the previous homeowner had those things. Then the lady who owns or runs the place starts into Nathan telling him how her guys spent all day working on this and it cost them money and he was greedy to take stuff back from a charity! Until that point we had been sympathetic to the charity knowing that it was an unfortunate situation, but not really our fault! Nathan listened to her rant then asked her how she would feel if she went home and saw two guys coming out of her house that she didn't allow in, loading stuff into a truck?! She didn't have much to say about that. She did say she was going to notify the papers about the whole thing. HA! I'm sure they'd get a twisted view of it too.

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Little Bo Peep and her Little Sheep

This year for Halloween I wanted a themed costume for the girls. I kind of borrowed this idea from my friend Candice. I pieced together Kaleigh's costume from borrowed items, thrift store, garage sale & stuff we already had. We have several events & birthday parties to go to and dress up for. The first one was a community event in Benton. They had little games and inflatables and even horseback rides!

Friday, October 23, 2009

Kaleigh's Birthday & Misc

Kaleigh had a great 4th birthday party. We decided to do a musical theme this year. Unfortunately, our pictures were not so great. You know those expensive cameras - one little setting gets off and everything is blurry. She loved it though and that's all that really matters.

We had a little trailer ride rigged up for the kids. I think that was probably the highlight of the party. That and the Dora pinata getting completely decapitated! We also had a musical squares game and a little obstacle course set up for the kids.

Wednesday, October 07, 2009

BIRTHDAY PARTY!

We had the babies' party on their actual birthday, October 1st. A big part of the party was taking pictures of them and watching them dig into the cakes. They liked the icing but didn't get very messy. If you are on facebook, I'm going to post a lot more pictures on there. Just so you know, Nitzia embroidered the onesies for me and I made the hairbows (Nitzia taught me how). Nathan said he thought that was the most crafty thing I've ever done!

Stay tuned for more posts coming up telling about our trip to Texas for the reunion at the Texas Children's Fetal Center and an impromptu 2 day trip to the beach at Galveston!

Thursday, October 01, 2009

Happy Birthday Avery & Alexis!

One year ago today God blessed us with two more precious little girls. Honestly, this year has gone by pretty fast.

Here is an update on what the girls are doing now:

They are both crawling really well.They can pull up on anything & everything and do so often.Both are good at picking up cheerios - still working on more "slippery" types of solid foods.Recently we discovered that they will actually sit still for 30 minutes and watch Baby Einstein.They babble a lot, especially Avery. Favorite words are mama, dada, baby, & meme.

Avery loves to be around people and beams when getting attention. She is sweet & calm on the whole, but she can throw a fit when it's time to nap and she doesn't want to! She babbles a lot and likes to pick up every little speck off the floor and put it in her mouth. She is a little more passive than Alexis, but if they are fighting over a toy, she will almost always win b/c she doesn't give up easily!Alexis is active and loud. She likes to explore and seems to be a leader, doing a lot of things first. She's also quite the drama queen. I can usually tell the girls apart from their cries. Alexis's is loud and angry, Avery's is usually pretty sad like. Alexis can be very cuddly too, especially at night right before bedtime.

About Me

My name is Shelly (or mommy) and I've been married to the love of my life for 8 years in July. I'm a stay at home mom to our 4 precious girls. We like to joke that we planned 2 and God planned 2 even though we really know God planned them all. Kaleigh was born in 2005 and in 2008 our miracle twins Avery & Alexis joined us. And our sweet little surprise Emory came along in 2010. Right now we're trying to keep our heads above water and this is my way of keeping track of the craziness!